The “Marketing Confidence Gap.” That’s Ogilvy parlance for that vexing and persistent chasm between, on the one hand, the high percentage of media time spent by the average consumer online and, on the other, the relatively low percentage of overall ad budgets being directed online. I believe OgilvyOne’s global CEO Brian Featherstonhaugh may have been the one to coin the phrase. The PowerPoint slide illustrating the gap, with one line up top, closing on 20% of consumer time spent with online media, and the other line, the south rim of the chasm, slowly squiggling northward toward double digits, is one of those slides that shows up regularly in internal presentations. I’ve put it in who knows how many presentations myself. Media spend, the logic goes, should be proportionally allocated to the media that consumers actually engage in, by time spent engaged since that’s a handy measure.

The other day a friend and former colleague of mine, who’s been asked to moderate a panel on this particular topic at a large upcoming conference, hit me up for some thoughts on the topic. It really got me thinking.

Last time I gave a presentation that included a slide on the marketing confidence gap was just before the Spring Festival holiday, I was asked by a colleague in PR to speak to a group of visiting university students from Syracuse in upstate New York. When I posed the question of why the gap persists to them–they’re all totally digitally savvy youngsters, like most college students in the States–one young man raised his hand and said that he couldn’t remember a single Internet ad, has never felt compelled to click on one, and pretty much hates Internet advertising in all its forms, while on the other hand he can remember loads of TV commercials. It’s the creative, he thought, that was the difference.

He’s right in part, of course, though I suggested (and do half believe!) that if a big brand spent anything close to the kind of cash on Internet campaigns that they do on TVCs, the concepts, the creative, would be every bit as compelling as the TV ads.

I didn’t share this little anecdote with my friend who had a panel to moderate, but it did inform my response to him, the gist of which follows. I wondered whether we’re simply not seeing an important piece to this. Is it as simple as we’ve suggested here–as simple as that ubiquitous slide would suggest? Or are those of us who long ago drank the digital Kool-Aid just blind to inherent limitations to the impact of brand messaging in Internet ads–limitations that brands instinctively recognize? We’re always prattling on about the importance of listening–of listening to the man in the street in this age of the empowered consumer. But are we listening closely enough to the people who actually control media budgets? It seems to me that they’re in a position to cut big checks to agencies to make TVCs because their brands have done something right–that their outdated, traditional approach to marketing has somehow worked.

Sure, the old CMOs are crusty analog types, and they’ll be replaced soon enough and that’s going to help the gap to close naturally, right? They grew up with TV, and were settled into their ways by the time the Internet–let along mobile–had really taken hold. Part of it’s simply generational inertia. And that’s quite natural: if you were to look back at the 1950s, and look at TV–back then, the disruptive new media–versus radio or newspaper ad spend, I’m sure you’d see a gap too, and find that it took a while for that gap to close. Surely there was a time when people were spending time glued to their sets, shifting attention away from newsprint and radio, but advertisers were still putting their money into what was then the tried and true.

So should we even be getting all worked up about the marketing confidence gap? Or is it something that’s going to close on its own anyway? Maybe we should all be spending more of our time doing the business of creating effective interactive campaigns rather than trying to will history to overcome inertia faster, and yammering on (or blogging on, in this case) about whose fault it is that the ball isn’t rolling any faster. Nah. Someone’s gotta do the yammering.